Since the first edition of this work was issued, startling and deplorable events have occurred. The great “Anti-Slavery” delusion, that originated with European monarchists more than fifty years ago, has culminated in disunion and civil war, as its authors always predicted it would. A party strongly imbued with the false theories and absurd assumptions of British writers and abolition societies, is in possession of the Federal Government, which it stands pledged to use to reduce its assumptions to practice. It holds that the negro, except in color, is a man like themselves, and naturally entitled to the same liberty—that to deny him this liberty, is to enslave him—that, therefore, Southern society is wrong, and should be revolutionized, and it avows it to be its mission to accomplish this—to institute a policy that shall finally abolish or destroy the supremacy of the white man, and secure “impartial freedom” for negroes! To this the South replies, that this government was created for white men alone, and _their_ posterity, as declared in the preamble to the Constitution—that the Supreme Court has recently declared the same great truth—that, seizing the government by a mere sectional vote, and placing it in distinct conflict with the social order of the South, with the avowed purpose of penning up its negro population, in order to bring about some day the extinction or overthrow of the existing condition, is, therefore, an overthrow of the Constitution—that the object avowed necessarily involves their future destruction, and to save themselves from the wild delusion and malignant fanaticism of the North, they are forced, in self-defense, to withdraw from the Union, hitherto, or until this hostile and dangerous party entered the field, so beneficial to all sections of the country.